So: Retail Battlefield 3 Will Require Origin

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The moves! They are becoming clearer. As many of you speculated, it seems that the retail version of Battlefield 3 will indeed require Origin to be installed on your computer in order to play it. Oh Twitter, how did we find out brief snippets of information (or organise anarchic uprisings against the grim hegemony of shoe shops) before you existed?

This admission by EA probably goes some way to explaining why the game won’t appear on Steam, because it would basically entail two Steam-like systems being folded around the game, and they would inevitably fight like giant sperm whales versus kraken in the magnetic depths of your hard-drive. Such a conflict would undoubtedly cause electronic terribleness to occur, and no-one wants that. That’s my understanding of the technical situation, at least. I suspect there are also overriding commercial monsters pulling the levers behind the scenes. This is the game could spread Origin about in the game-o-sphere, just as Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2 propagated Steam.

Not a big deal. I’ve had very good luck with Origin so far and they even gave me a free download today for preordering BF3. I’ve found that their servers are fast as hell, easily take up my bandwidth which I am fond of. If I want to use the Steam overlay that’s fine, I just add a non steam game into the .exe library and I can talk to my friends. I have a nice computer so I don’t even care if I have to keep Origin on in the background, barely takes up resources as it is. EA isn’t out to screw us. Origin makes that horrible DRM diminish and it’s so much easier to keep BF3 up to date.

Bad Company 2 was one of the few games that I paid full price for when it came out, I liked it that much (pre-ordered on Steam based on how awesome the beta was). But I’m not going to play ball with this power play. If EA think they are going to become a player in online publishing by holding BF3 hostage to their platform, they’re just going to lose a lot of sales.

EA seemed to be positioning BF3 as their CoD killer – but taking it off the main PC distribution system isn’t going to do it any favors in that regard. (unless they don’t care about PC and only the console sales).

They’re basically betting that the lure of BF3 will transcend the lure of Steam.

Of course, if it pays off then they’ll have a huge user-base for future origin games.

PS/ Is Origin actually anything new yet? Last time i checked it just seemed to be their old crappy digital-river EA store but with a new logo pasted on. In which case I’m not touching it!

Well thanks EA for helping me make my decision regarding BF3. I really wanted to try out the single player, but I have no interest in Origin, and I don’t want it on my system, I have too much shit on there already, adding another one to the mix when it offers nothing I want or need? Yeah no thanks.

Everyone saying EA and Valve are the same here… uh, so not the case. EA is doing this with only games they publish, they don’t have any 3rd parties on there, and even if they do, you think other publishers are gonna be happy giving EA their money when they are already giving it to Valve?

We’ll see if the service is up to par in a few years, maybe then it’ll be worth installing, until then… there’s over 300 games on my Steam library that are begging to be played. I don’t need to load up another program just for 1 game when I have so many options.

Don’t all the new free MMOs have their own launchers that border on mini stores. Heck look at games like ‘Wings of Prey’! It has a mini-Steam-like-thing (Yuplay) that handles all updates, activations, account management, and even MP matchmaking! Personally if BF3 was on Steam, and it downloaded some sort of internal Origin thing, I wouldn’t mind. I would prefer it be Origin Lite or something allowing you to drop into full Origin if you want via the key, but I wouldn’t mind.